You don\’t have to spend a lot for that smarthome.

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Welcome to IVB's Home Theater and Home Automation blog. I hope you enjoy reading about how i'm building my own smart home using art from VladStudio.com, an Elk automation panel, and the CQC HA/HT software engine.

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My easy $2 outdoor Concerto on/off switch

Man, this Elk panel combined with CQC is really a pretty powerful combo, and it’s beauty is it’s simplicity.

I’m working from home today as I had to drop the car off at the mechanic. The wife has been spending tons of time on the patio almost every day lately as the weather has been pretty nice. But half the time when she’s out there, she forgets to turn on the patio speakers, or decide later to turn on the speakers. This means schlepping inside the house.

I just spent <1hour (my god it’s true, some things are easy):
1) taking one of the 40 year old light switches I pulled out when I put my zWave switches in,
2) mounting a single gang box in a hidden and protected location (just under the stairs under the awning – very easy to get to),
3) fishing wire to the Elk panel, and hooking it up to a zone. After setting it up as a non-alarm zone in the Elk, I
4) setup a trigger in CQC. If the light is switched, it toggles the power state of the patio zone for the concerto. If it’s currently off, it turns it on, sets it to XM, station #20, volume of -21.

Sure, it’s not earth shattering nor is it rocket science, but I got an “oh, that’s cool” from the wife. Plus it was cheap, an incremental cost of $1.50 for the single gang box. I got boatloads of wire, plus the switch and faceplate are old and look awful. But given that you cannot physically see it unless you look under the stairs, it’s good enough.

Every little thing helps for the overall WAF, esp cheap stuff like this.